The following appeared in the May-June 2000 issue of
Probe
magazine, (Vol.7,No.4) and is mirrored from
http://ctka.net/pr500-king.html
with permission of the author. We are
grateful for Jim Douglass’ “being there” and for his penetrating
exploration and accounting of the 20th Century’s true “trial of
the century”. September 2012: New links are now added to directly
reference the transcript of the 1999 Trial in Memphis.

According to
a
Memphis jury’s verdict on December 8, 1999, in
the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Loyd
Jowers “and other unknown co-conspirators,” Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included
agencies of his own government. Almost 32 years after King’s
murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a
court extended the circle of responsibility for the
assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the
United States government.

I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the
courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy
and I attended from beginning to end this historic
three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect
scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went
on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial’s
second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S.
correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there
several days, turned to me and said, "Everything in the U.S. is
the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson’s trial was the trial of
the century. Clinton’s trial was the trial of the century. But
this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?"

What I experienced in that courtroom ranged from
inspiration at the courage of the Kings, their
lawyer-investigator William F. Pepper, and the witnesses, to
amazement at the government’s carefully interwoven plot to kill
Dr. King. The seriousness with which U.S. intelligence agencies
planned the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. speaks eloquently
of the threat Kingian nonviolence represented to the powers
that be in the spring of 1968.

In the complaint filed by the King family, “King versus
Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators,” the only named
defendant, Loyd Jowers, was never their primary concern. As
soon became evident in court, the real defendants were the
anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows behind
Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings
and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies
– particularly the FBI and Army intelligence – with
organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination.
Such a charge guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its
being argued in a court within the United States. Judicially it
is an unwelcome beast.

I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the
courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy
and I attended from beginning to end this historic
three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect
scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went
on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial’s
second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S.
correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there
several days, turned to me and said, “Everything in the U.S. is
the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson’s trial was the trial of
the century. Clinton’s trial was the trial of the century. But
this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?”

Many qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in the
King case. It came not in criminal court but in civil court,
where the standards of evidence are much lower than in criminal
court. (For example, the plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made
on audiotapes and videotapes.) Furthermore, the King family as
plaintiffs and Jowers as defendant agreed ahead of time on much
of the evidence.

But these observations are not entirely to the point.
Because of the government’s “sovereign immunity,” it is not
possible to put a U.S. intelligence agency in the dock of a
U.S. criminal court. Such a step would require authorization by
the federal government, which is not likely to indict itself.
Thanks to the conjunction of a civil court, an independent
judge with a sense of history, and a courageous family and
lawyer, a spiritual breakthrough to an unspeakable truth
occurred in Memphis. It allowed at least a few people (and
hopefully many more through them) to see the forces behind
King’s martyrdom and to feel the responsibility we all share
for it through our government. In the end, twelve jurors, six
black and six white, said to everyone willing to hear: guilty
as charged.

We can also thank the unlikely figure of Loyd Jowers for
providing a way into that truth.

Loyd Jowers: When the frail, 73-year-old Jowers became ill
after three days in court, Judge Swearengen excused him. Jowers
did not testify and said through his attorney, Lewis Garrison,
that he would plead the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed. His
discretion was too late. In 1993 against the advice of
Garrison, Jowers had gone public. Prompted by William Pepper’s
progress as James Earl Ray’s attorney in uncovering Jowers’s
role in the assassination, Jowers told his story to Sam
Donaldson on Prime Time Live. He said he had been asked
to help in the murder of King and was told there would be a
decoy (Ray) in the plot. He was also told that the police
“wouldn’t be there that night.”

In that interview, the transcript of which was read to the
jury in the Memphis courtroom, Jowers said the man who asked
him to help in the murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer
named Frank Liberto. Liberto, now deceased,
had a courier
deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant, Jim’s
Grill, the back door of which opened onto the dense bushes
across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited the
day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle
in a box.

Young, who witnessed the assassination, can be heard on the
tape identifying McCollough as the man kneeling beside King’s
body on the balcony in a famous photograph. According to
witness
Cobey
Vernon Smith, McCollough
had
infiltrated a Memphis community organizing group, the Invaders, which was
working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In
his trial testimony Young said the MPD intelligence agent was
“the guy who ran up [the balcony stairs] with us to see
Martin.”

Jowers says on the tape that right after the shot was fired
he
received a smoking rifle at the rear door of Jim’s Grill
from Clark. He broke the rifle down into two pieces and wrapped
it in a tablecloth. Raul picked it up the next day. Jowers said
he didn’t actually see who fired the shot that killed King, but
thought it was Clark, the MPD’s best marksman.

Young testified that his impression from the 1998 meeting
was that the aging, ailing Jowers
“wanted
to get right with God
before he died, wanted to confess it and be free of it.” Jowers
denied, however, that he knew the plot’s purpose was to kill
King – a claim that seemed implausible to Dexter King and
Young. Jowers has continued to fear jail, and he had directed
Garrison to defend him on the grounds that he didn’t know the
target of the plot was King. But his interview with Donaldson
suggests he was not naïve on this point.

Loyd Jowers’s story opened the door to testimony that
explored the systemic nature of the murder in seven other basic
areas:

“I have no doubt,” Lawson said, “that the government viewed
all this seriously enough to plan his assassination.”

Coretta
Scott King testified that her husband had to return
to Memphis in early April 1968
because
of a violent demonstration there for which he had been blamed. Moments
after King arrived in Memphis to join the sanitation workers’
march there on March 28, 1968, the scene turned violent –
subverted by government provocateurs, Lawson said. Thus King
had to return to Memphis on April 3 and prepare for a truly
nonviolent march, Mrs. King said, to prove SCLC could still
carry out a nonviolent campaign in Washington.

Wallace guessed
it
was because “I was putting out fires,”
he told the jury with a smile. Asked if he ever received a
satisfactory explanation for his transfer Wallace answered,
“No. Never did. Not to this day.”

In the March-April Probe, Mike Vinson described the
similar removal of
Ed
Redditt, a black Memphis Police Department detective, from his
Fire Station 2 surveillance post two hours before King’s murder.

To understand the Redditt incident, it is important to note
that it was Redditt himself who initiated his watch on Dr. King
from the firehouse across the street. Redditt testified that
when King’s party and the police accompanying them (including
Detective Redditt) arrived from the airport at the Lorraine
Motel
on
April 3, he “noticed something that was unusual.” When
Inspector Don Smith, who was in charge of security, told
Redditt he could leave, Redditt “noticed there was nobody else
there. In the past when we were assigned to Dr. King [when
Redditt had been part of a black security team for King], we
stayed with him. I saw nobody with him. So I went across the
street and asked the Fire Department could we come in and
observe from the rear, which we did.” Given Redditt’s concerns
for King’s safety, his particular watch on the Lorraine may not
have fit into others’ plans.

In an interview after the trial, Redditt told me the story
of how his 1978 testimony on this question before the House
Select Committee on Assassinations was part of a heavily
pressured cover-up. “It was a farce,” he said, “a total farce.”

Redditt had been subpoenaed by the HSCA to testify, as he
came to realize, not so much on his strange removal from Fire
Station 2 as the fact that he had spoken about it openly to
writers and researchers. The HSCA focused narrowly on the
discrepancy between Redditt’s surveiling King (as he was doing)
and acting as security (an impression Redditt had given writers
interviewing him) in order to discredit the story of his
removal. Redditt was first grilled by the committee for eight
straight hours in a closed executive session. After a day of
hostile questioning, Redditt finally said late in the
afternoon, “I came here as a friend of the investigation, not
as an enemy of the investigation. You don’t want to deal with
the truth.” He told the committee angrily that if the secret
purpose behind the King conspiracy was, like the JFK
conspiracy, “to protect the country, just tell the American
people! They’ll be happy! And quit fooling the folks and trying
to pull the wool over their eyes.”

When the closed hearing was over, Redditt received a
warning call from a friend in the White House who said, “Man,
your life isn’t worth a wooden nickel.”

Redditt said his public testimony the next day “was a
set-up”: “The bottom line on that one was that Senator Baker
decided that I wouldn’t go into this open hearing without an
attorney. When the lawyer and I arrived at the hearing, we were
ushered right back out across town to the executive director in
charge of the investigation. [We] looked through a book, to
look at the questions and answers.”

“So in essence what they were saying was: ‘This is what
you’re going to answer to, and this is how you’re going to
answer.’ It was all made up – all designed, questions and
answers, what to say and what not to say. A total farce.”

Former
MPD Captain Jerry Williams followed Redditt to the
witness stand. Williams had been responsible for forming a
special security unit of black officers whenever King came to
Memphis (the unit Redditt had served on earlier). Williams took
pride in providing the best possible protection for Dr. King,
which included, he said, advising him never to stay at the Lorraine
“because
we couldn’t furnish proper security there.”
(“It was just an open view,” he explained to me later, “Anybody
could . . . There was no protection at all. To me that was a
set-up from the very beginning.”)

Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response
to his plan to hold the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington,
D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation’s capital in the
spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the
government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis
sanitation workers’ strike as the beginning of a nonviolent
revolution that would redistribute income. “I have no doubt,”
Lawson said, “that the government viewed all this seriously
enough to plan his assassination.”

Bailey explained that the night before King’s arrival he
had received a call “from a member of Dr. King’s group in
Atlanta.” The caller (whom Bailey said he knew but referred to
only by the pronoun “he”) wanted the motel owner to change
King’s room. Bailey said he was adamantly opposed to moving
King, as instructed, from an inner court room behind the motel
office (which had better security) to an outside balcony room
exposed to public view.

“If they had listened to me,” Bailey said, “this wouldn’t
have happened.”

I visited Catling in her home, and she told me the man she
had seen running was not James Earl Ray. “I will go into my
grave saying that was not Ray, because the gentleman I saw was
heavier than Ray.”

“The police,” she told me, “asked not one neighbor [around
the Lorraine], ‘What did you see?’ Thirty-one years went by.
Nobody came and asked one question. I often thought about that.
I even had nightmares over that, because they never said
anything. How did they let him get away?”

Earl
Caldwell was a New York Times
reporter in his room at the Lorraine Motel the
evening of April 4. In videotaped testimony, Caldwell said
he
heard what he thought was a bomb blast at 6:00 p.m. When he ran
to the door and looked out, he saw a man crouched in the heavy
part of the bushes across the street. The man was looking over
at the Lorraine’s balcony. Caldwell wrote an article about the
figure in the bushes but was never questioned about what he had
seen by any authorities.

In a 1993 affidavit from former SCLC official
James
Orange that was read into the record, Orange said that on April 4,
“James Bevel and I were driven around by Marrell McCollough, a
person who at that time we knew to be a member of the Invaders,
a local community organizing group, and who we subsequently
learned was an undercover agent for the Memphis Police
Department and who now works for the Central Intelligence
Agency . . . [After the shot, when Orange saw Dr. King’s leg
dangling over the balcony], I looked back and saw the smoke. It
couldn’t have been more than five to ten seconds.
The
smoke came out of the brush area on the opposite side of the street
from the Lorraine Motel. I saw it rise up from the bushes over
there. From that day to this time I have never had any doubt
that the fatal shot, the bullet which ended Dr. King’s life,
was fired by a sniper concealed in the brush area behind the
derelict buildings.

“I also remember then turning my attention back to the
balcony and seeing Marrell McCollough up on the balcony
kneeling over Dr. King, looking as though he was checking Dr.
King for life signs.

“I also noticed, quite early the next morning around 8 or 9
o’clock, that all of the bushes and brush on the hill were cut
down and cleaned up. It was as though the entire area of the
bushes from behind the rooming house had been cleared . . .

“I will always remember the puff of white smoke and the cut
brush and having never been given a satisfactory explanation.

“When I tried to tell the police at the scene as best I saw
they told me to be quiet and to get out of the way.

“I was never interviewed or asked what I saw by any law
enforcement authority in all of the time since 1968.”

Circuit Court Judge
Arthur
Hanes Jr. of Birmingham, Alabama,
had been Ray’s attorney in 1968. (On the eve of his
trial, Ray replaced Hanes and his father, Arthur Hanes Sr., by
Percy Foreman, a decision
Ray
told the Haneses one week later was the biggest mistake of his life.)
Hanes testified that in
the summer of 1968 he interviewed Guy Canipe, owner of the
Canipe Amusement Company. Canipe was a witness to the dropping
in his doorway of a bundle that held a trove of James Earl Ray
memorabilia, including the rifle, unfired bullets, and a radio
with Ray’s prison identification number on it. This dropped
bundle, heaven (or otherwise) sent for the State’s case against
Ray, can be accepted as credible evidence through a willing
suspension of disbelief. As Judge Hanes summarized the State’s
lone-assassin theory (with reference to an exhibit depicting
the scene), “James Earl Ray had fired the shot from the
bathroom on that second floor, come down that hallway into his
room and carefully packed that box, tied it up, then had
proceeded across the walkway the length of the building to the
back where that stair from that door came up, had come down the
stairs out the door,
placed
the Browning box containing the rifle and the radio there in the Canipe
entryway.” Then Ray
presumably got in his car seconds before the police’s arrival,
driving from downtown Memphis to Atlanta unchallenged in his
white Mustang.

Concerning his interview with the witness who was the
cornerstone of this theory, Judge Hanes told the jury that Guy
Canipe (now deceased) provided “terrific evidence”: “He said
that the package was dropped in his doorway by a man headed
south down Main Street on foot,
and
that this happened at about ten minutes before the shot was fired
[emphasis added].”

Hanes thought Canipe’s witnessing the bundle-dropping ten
minutes before the shot was very credible for another reason.
It so happened (as confirmed by Philip Melanson’s research)
that at 6:00 p.m. one of the MPD tactical units that had been
withdrawn earlier by Inspector Evans, TACT 10, had returned
briefly to the area with its 16 officers for a rest break at
Fire Station 2. Thus, as Hanes testified, with the firehouse
brimming with police, some already watching King across the street,
“when they saw Dr. King go down,
the
fire house erupted like a beehive . . . In
addition to the time involved [in Ray’s
presumed odyssey from the bathroom to the car], it was
circumstantially almost impossible to believe that somebody had
been able to throw that [rifle] down and leaave right in the
face of that erupting fire station.”

When I spoke with Judge Hanes after the trial about the
startling evidence he had received from Canipe, he commented,
“That’s what I’ve been saying for 30 years.”

William
Hamblin testified not about the rifle thrown
down in the Canipe doorway but rather the smoking rifle Loyd
Jowers said he received at his back door from Earl Clark right
after the shooting. Hamblin recounted a story he was told many
times by his friend James McCraw, who had died.

James
McCraw is already well-known to researchers as the
taxi driver who arrived at the rooming house to pick up Charlie
Stephens shortly before 6:00 p.m. on April 4. In a deposition
read earlier to the jury, McCraw said he found Stephens in his
room lying on his bed too drunk to get up, so McCraw turned out
the light and left without him – minutes before Stephens,
according to the State, identified Ray in profile passing down
the hall from the bathroom. McCraw also
said
the bathroom door next to Stephen’s room was standing wide open, and
there was no one in the bathroom – where again, according
to the State, Ray was then balancing on the tub, about to squeeze the trigger.

William Hamblin told the jury that he and fellow cab-driver
McCraw were close friends for about 25 years. Hamblin said he
probably
heard
McCraw tell the same rifle story 50 times, but only when
McCraw had been drinking and had his defenses down.

In that story, McCraw said that Loyd Jowers had given him
the rifle right after the shooting. According to Hamblin,
“Jowers told him to get the [rifle] and get it out of here now.
[McCraw] said that he grabbed his beer and snatched it out. He
had the rifle rolled up in an oil cloth, and he leapt out the
door and did away with it.”
McCraw
told Hamblin he threw the rifle off a bridge into the Mississippi River.

Hamblin said McCraw never revealed publicly what he knew of
the rifle because, like Jowers, he was afraid of being
indicted: “He really wanted to come out with it, but he was
involved in it. And he couldn’t really tell the truth.”

One of the most significant developments in the
Memphis trial was the emergence of the mysterious Raul through
the testimony of a series of witnesses.

In a 1995 deposition by James Earl Ray that was read to the
jury,
Ray
told of meeting Raul in Montreal in the summer of
1967, three months after Ray had escaped from a Missouri
prison. According to Ray, Raul guided Ray’s movements, gave him
money for the Mustang car and the rifle, and used both to set
him up in Memphis.

The additional witnesses who identified the photo as Raul’s
included: British merchant seaman
Sidney
Carthew, who in a
videotaped deposition from England said
he
had met Raul
(who
offered to sell him guns) and a man he thinks was Ray (who
wanted to be smuggled onto his ship) in Montreal in the summer
of 1967; Glenda and
Roy
Grabow, who recognized Raul as a
gunrunner they knew in Houston in the ‘60s and ‘70s and who
told Glenda in a rage that he had killed Martin Luther King;
Royce
Wilburn, Glenda’s brother, who also knew Raul in Houston;
and British television producer
Jack
Saltman, who had obtained
the passport photo and showed it to Ray in prison, who
identified it as the photo of the person who had guided him.

Saltman and Pepper, working on independent investigations,
located Raul in 1995. He was living quietly with his family in
the northeastern U.S. It was there in 1997 that journalist
Barbara
Reis of the Lisbon Publico, working on a story
about Raul, spoke with a member of his family. Reis testified
that she had spoken in Portuguese to a woman in Raul’s family
who, after first denying any connection to Ray’s Raul, said
“they” had visited them. “Who?” Reis asked.
“The
government,”
said the woman. She said government agents had visited them
three times over a three-year period. The government, she said,
was watching over them and monitoring their phone calls. The
woman
took
comfort and satisfaction in the fact that her family
(so she believed) was being protected by the government.

In his closing argument Pepper said of Raul:
“Now, as I
understand it, the defense had invited Raul to appear here. He
is outside this jurisdiction, so a subpoena would be futile. But
he was asked to appear here. In earlier proceedings there
were attempts to depose him, and he resisted them. So he has
not attempted to come forward at all and tell his side of the
story or to defend himself.”

Terrell said
J.D.
Hill was shot to death. His wife was
charged with shooting Hill (in response to his drinking), but
she was not indicted. From the details of Hill’s death, Terrell
thought the story about Hill’s wife shooting him was a cover,
and that
his
friend had been assassinated. In an interview,
Terrell said the CIA’s heavy censorship of his book
Disposable
Patriot (1992) included changing the
paragraph on J.D. Hill’s death, so that it read as if Terrell
thought Hill’s wife was responsible.

When I interviewed Fauntroy in a van on his way back to the
Memphis Airport, I asked about the implications of his
statements in an April 4, 1997 Atlanta Constitution
article. The article said Fauntroy now believed “Ray did not
fire the shot that killed King and was part of a larger
conspiracy that possibly involved federal law enforcement
agencies,” and added: “Fauntroy said he kept silent about his
suspicions because of fear for himself and his family.”

Fauntroy told me that when he left Congress in 1991 he had
the opportunity to read through his files on the King
assassination, including raw materials that he’d never seen
before. Among them was information from J. Edgar Hoover’s logs.
There he learned that in the three weeks before King’s murder
the FBI chief held a series of meetings with “persons involved
with the CIA and military intelligence in the Phoenix operation
in Southeast Asia.” Why? Fauntroy also discovered there had
been Green Berets and military intelligence agents in Memphis
when King was killed. “What were they doing there?” he asked.

When Fauntroy had talked about his decision to write a book
about what he’d “uncovered since the assassination committee
closed down,” he was promptly investigated and charged by the
Justice Department with having violated his financial reports
as a member of Congress. His lawyer told him that he could not
understand why the Justice Department would bring up a charge
on the technicality of one misdated check. Fauntroy said he
interpreted the Justice Department’s action to mean: “Look,
we’ll get you on something if you continue this way. . . . I
just thought: I’ll tell them I won’t go and finish the book,
because it’s surely not worth it.”

At the conclusion of his trial testimony, Fauntroy also
spoke about his fear of an FBI attempt to kill James Earl Ray
when
he escaped from Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain State
Penitentiary in June 1977. Congressman Fauntroy had heard
reports about an FBI SWAT team having been sent into the area
around the prison to shoot Ray and prevent his testifying at
the HSCA hearings. Fauntroy asked HSCA chair Louis Stokes to
alert Tennesssee Governor Ray Blanton to the danger to the
HSCA’s star witness and Blanton’s most famous prisoner. When
Stokes did, Blanton called off the FBI SWAT team, Ray was
caught safely by local authorities, and in Fauntroy’s words,
“we all breathed a sigh of relief.”

So it goes – downhill. The above is Glankler’s high-water
mark: He got two out of the first ten (if one counts Charles
and Peggy Hurley as a yes). Pepper questioned Glankler about 25
key witnesses. The jury was familiar with all of them from
prior testimony in the trial. Glankler could recall his office
interviewing a total of three. At the twenty-fifth-named
witness, Earl Caldwell, Pepper finally let Glankler go:

Q. Did you ever interview a former New York
Times journalist, a New York Daily News
correspondent named
Earl Caldwell?

A. Earl Caldwell? Not that I recall.

Q. You never interviewed him in the course of your investigation?

A. I just don’t recall that name.

MR. PEPPER: I have no further comments about this
investigation – no further questions for this investigator.

Pepper went a step beyond saying government agencies were
responsible for the assassination. To whom in turn were those
murderous agencies responsible? Not so much to government
officials per se, Pepper asserted, as to the economic
powerholders they represented who stood in the even deeper
shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their affiliates
in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, “And today it
is much worse in my view” – “the decision-making processes in
the United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of
the very economic interests that were going to suffer as a
result of these times of changes [being activated by King].”
To
say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther
King on the verge of the Poor People’s Campaign is a way into
the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which
dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the
Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat
to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how
determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington
was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the
plot to kill him.

The vision behind the trial

In his sprawling, brilliant work that underlies the trial,
Orders
to Kill (1995),
William Pepper introduced readers to most of the 70 witnesses
who took the stand in Memphis or were cited by deposition,
tape, and other witnesses. To keep this article from reading
like either an encyclopedia or a Dostoevsky novel, I have
highlighted only a few. (Thanks to the
King Center,
the full trial transcript is available online at
http://www.thekingcenter.com/tkc/trial.html.)
[The transcript is no longer available at the King Center. Hypertext,
PDF, and text-only representations are available at
ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLKACT/
–Editor]
What Pepper’s work has accomplished in
print and in court can be measured by the intensity of the
media attacks on him, shades of Jim Garrison. But even Garrison
did not gain the support of the Kennedy family (in his case) or
achieve a guilty verdict. The Memphis trial has opened wide a
door to our assassination politics. Anyone who walks through it
is faced by an either/or: to declare naked either the empire or
oneself.

Dexter
King, the plaintiffs’ final witness, said the trial
was about why his father had been killed: “From a
holistic side, in terms of the people, in terms of the masses,
yes, it has to be dealt with because it is not about who killed
Martin Luther King Jr., my father. It is not necessarily about
all of those details. It is about: Why was he killed?
Because
if you answer the why, you will understand the same
things are still happening. Until we address that, we’re all in
trouble. Because if it could happen to him, if it can happen to
this family, it can happen to anybody.

“She reminded me. She said, ‘Dexter, your dad and I have
lived through this once already. You have to understand that
when you take a stand against the establishment, first, you
will be attacked. There is an attempt to discredit. Second, [an
attempt] to try and character-assassinate. And third,
ultimately physical termination or assassination.’

“The second aspect of his work that also dealt with money
that caused a great deal of consternation in the circles of
power in this land had to do with his commitment to take a
massive group of people to Washington. . . . Now he began to
talk about a redistribution of wealth, in this the wealthiest
country in the world.”

To say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther
King on the verge of the Poor People’s Campaign is a way into
the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which
dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the
Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat
to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how
determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington
was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the
plot to kill him.

Dexter King testified to the truth of his father’s death
with transforming clarity:

“The issue becomes: What do we do about this? Do we endorse
a policy in this country, in this life, that says if we don’t
agree with someone, the only means to deal with it is through
elimination and termination? I think my father taught us the
opposite, that you can overcome without violence.

The jury returned with a verdict after two and
one-half hours. Judge James E. Swearengen of Shelby County
Circuit Court, a gentle African-American man in his last few
days before retirement, read the verdict aloud. The courtroom
was now crowded with spectators, almost all black.

“In answer to the question, ‘Did Loyd Jowers participate in
a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King?’ your answer
is ‘Yes.’” The man on my left leaned forward and whispered
softly, “Thank you, Jesus.”

The judge continued: “Do you also find that others,
including governmental agencies, were parties to this
conspiracy as alleged by the defendant?’ Your answer to that
one is also ‘Yes.’” An even more heartfelt whisper: “Thank you,
Jesus!”

Perhaps the lesson of the King assassination is that our
government understands the power of nonviolence better than we
do, or better than we want to. In the spring of 1968, when
Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy was campaigning),
King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience
would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military
power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously.
They dealt with him in Memphis.
Thirty-two
years after Memphis, we know that the government
that now honors Dr. King with a national holiday also killed
him. As will once again become evident when the Justice
Department releases the findings of its “limited
re-investigation” into King’s death, the government (as a
footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up –
just as it continues to do in the closely related murders of
John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X.

David Morphy, the only juror to grant an interview, said
later: “We can look back on it and say that we did change
history. But that’s not why we did it. It was because there was
an overwhelming amount of evidence and just too many odd
coincidences.

“Everything from the police department being pulled back,
to the death threat on Redditt, to the two black firefighters
being pulled off, to the military people going up on top of the
fire station, even to them going back to that point and cutting
down the trees. Who in their right mind would go and destroy a
crime scene like that the morning after? It was just very, very
odd.”

I drove the few blocks to the house on Mulberry Street, one
block north of the Lorraine Motel (now the
National Civil
Rights Museum). When I rapped loudly on
Olivia
Catling’s
security door, she was several minutes in coming. She said
she’d had the flu. I told her the jury’s verdict, and she
smiled. “So I can sleep now. For years I could still hear that
shot. After 31 years, my mind is at ease. So I can sleep now,
knowing that some kind of peace has been brought to the King
family. And that’s the best part about it.”

Perhaps the lesson of the King assassination is that our
government understands the power of nonviolence better than we
do, or better than we want to. In the spring of 1968, when
Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy was campaigning),
King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience
would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military
power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously.
They dealt with him in Memphis.

Thirty-two years after Memphis, we know that the government
that now honors Dr. King with a national holiday also killed
him. As will once again become evident when the Justice
Department releases the findings of its “limited
re-investigation” into King’s death, the government (as a
footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up –
just as it continues to do in the closely related murders of
John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X.

The faithful in a nonviolent movement that hopes to change
the distribution of wealth and power in the U.S.A. – as Dr.
King’s vision, if made real, would have done in 1968 – should
be willing to receive the same kind of reward that King did in
Memphis. As each of our religious traditions has affirmed from
the beginning, that recurring story of martyrdom (“witness”) is
one of ultimate transformation and cosmic good news.